From Superman to Super-Being:

Dr. Manhattan and the Nuclear Sublime

Theodore Weiskel declares in The Romantic Sublime, "The
essential claim of the sublime is that man can, in feeling and in
speech, transcend the human." (3) While this concept remains
stable, ideas about the source of this transcendence differ from
author to author: Longinus sited it in rhetoric, Burke in nature, and
Kant in mathematics. Taking Kant's ideas, Weiskel develops the
concept of the egotistical or Wordsworthian sublime, a state in which
the individual perceives something much larger/grander/loftier than
s/he, is struck by anxiety induced by the occasion, and recovers in a
moment which goes something like, "Sure, it's large/grand/lofty --
but I can still contain it in my mind. I must be even
larger/grander/loftier." Or, as Frances Ferguson explains in Solitude
and the Sublime: "Weiskel combines the schemata of structural
linguistics and Freudian psychoanalysis to suggest that the sublime
comes into its own when it creates not merely individual objects by
reference to a perceiving individual but also the individual subject as
a fantasmic producer of objects." (16)

Transplanting the discussion from European soil to American
and pleaching it into new forms, Rob Wilson attaches the notion of
landscape to the sublime in a recent book, American Sublime. Wilson
declares: "The genre of the sublime helped consolidate an American
identity founded in representing a landscape of immensity and
wildness ('power') open to multiple identifications ('use')." (5) Wilson
goes further in his discussion of the "nuclear sublime," which he sess
as a subset of the American sublime, one of those multiple
identifications. Amidst such a plentitude of possibilities, the task of
defining what exactly is contained in the term "nuclear sublime"
becomes crucial. One of the definitive distinctions rests in the cause
of the sublime moment -- in the nuclear sublime, the existence of
nuclear technology is that cause. The sublime moment itself also
changes, becomes "Not only can I hold this staggering thing (a
nuclear explosion) in my mind, but it has been 'created' and
maintained by my fellow human beings." Note that the nuclear
sublime holds supremely negative connotations in a way the
mathematical sublime never has. While one can argue that columns
of numbers helped create the science responsible for nuclear
technology, those columns are not associated with disasters as
monumental as Hiroshima or Nagasaki, diasasters so large that we
cannot perceive them except through a strange kind of synecdoche, so
that a blackened silhouette, a clock with its hands arrested, a row of
hospital cots serves as the only possible representation.

Nonetheless, the nuclear sublime, despite its associations with
guilt and shame, holds within itself the promise of human
transcendance to which Weiskel refers. It stands for more than a
resistance to or denial of the existence of nuclear weapons (which it
must, since that historical existence cannot be negated); it represents
a realization of supreme destructive power and a choice to not
employ that power, while celebrating its other aspects, such as the
beautiful simplicity of sub-atomic theory. This is the nuclear
sublime depicted in Alan Moore's comic book, Watchmen.

The series, written by Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons,
followed on the heels of Moore's elevation of DC Comics' regular series,
The Swamp-Thing, from straggler to star and the achievement of
numerous comics industry awards for his series MiracleMan.
Watchmen, released as a twelve issue limited series in 1986, was
published the following year as a graphic novel which became, at
one point, a Book of the Month Club alternate selection.

Watchmen's reception did not initiate a disruption of the comic
book tradition. In the early 1980s, comics, in the form of the graphic
novel, had begin to test the boundary between high and low art. Art
Spiegelman's Maus won a Pulitzer prize; critics hailed Love and
Rockets, drawn and written by the Brothers Hernandez, as the
cutting edge of the medium (Benton 17); and Frank Miller's Batman:
The Dark Knight Returns took a figure embedded in popular culture
and transfigured him, spawning story collections and an animated
series and changing the casting of the batman movie from Bill
Murray to Michael Keaton, turning the script from campish comedy
to special effects laden thriller. But Watchmen, more than any other
graphic novel, demonstrated the psychological complexity possible in this
new form.

Like Moore's other early works, Watchmen deals with the
definition of hero and the intrusion of the superheroic into a more
"realistic" (resembling our own) world. In Watchmen costumed
heroes, men and women who chose to "dress up in gaudy opera
costumes and express the notion of good and evil in simple, childish
terms" (Moore 65) have enjoyed a brief vogue, but their actions are
cut short when a real superhuman appears, created (in an "origin
story" that nodded at traditional origins like Spiderman's radioactive
spider bite) by a nuclear accident. Jon Osterman, a nuclear physicist,
is accidentally caught in an experiment that involves removing the
"intrinsic field" from a concrete block. His own intrinsic field
removed, his particles scattered, Osterman reassembles himself and
in the process gains what seems to be omnipotent control over the
physical world. The transformed Osterman, rechristened "Dr.
Manhattan" by the government (for obvious reasons), resembles the
human with increased perception John Locke describes in "An Essay
on Human Understanding," a being who:

would come nearer to the discover of the texture and
motion of the minute parts of corporeal things: and in many of
them, probably get ideas of their internal constitutions; but
then . . . be in a quite different world from other people:
nothing would appear the same to him . . . (quoted in Hertz 95)

At one point in the book, Manhattan's lover Laurie describes
him in words which echo Locke's:

. . . the way he looks at things . . . this world, the real world,
to him it's like walking through mist, and all the people are
like shadows, just shadows in the fog. I mean, tonight, right?
I walked out after twenty years and y'know what I bet he's
doing? His big, emotional reaction? He's either smartening up
for his TV interview, or watching quarks get stuck to gluinos.
Maybe both. (78)

Manhattan effortlessly floats through a world in which the
other heroes have to struggle. Without blinking an eye, he can
teleport away an unruly crowd threatening the White House or stop
the war in Vietnam by striding through the landscape in two
hundred foot high form. Manhattan's power-laden presence exposes
the original heroes for shoddy facsimiles. Shortly afterward, their
chosen occupation is outlawed by the government.

Manhattan's power is, of course, only a small facet of the work. Watchmen
employs postmodern techniques of storytelling, combining pages of
narrative with embedded texts: notes for an advertising campaign, a
desk calendar, newspaper articles, pages from one hero's scrapbook
and another's autobiography, as well as a comic book, Tales From the
Black Freighter, shown as it is read by a minor character. But despite
the dense and multiplicious storyline, Dr. Manhattan emerges a key
player in the text and, strangely enough, this superhuman figure
may be the character with which the reader most closely identifies.
In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud makes an observation which
sheds light on the relevance of Dr. Manhattan to the reader:

. . . the face you see in your mind is not the same as others see.
When two people interact, they usually look directly at one
another, seeing their partner's features in vivid detail. Each
one also sustains a constant awareness of his or her own face,
but this mind-picture is not nearly so vivid; just a sketchy
arrangement . . . a sense of shape . . . a sense of general
placement. Something as simple and basic -- as a cartoon.
This, when you look at a photo or a realistic drawing of a face
-- you see it as the face of another. But when you enter the
world of the cartoon -- you see yourself. (35-36)

Which leads us to the question: what character is the reader's
nexus of
identification in Watchmen. The answer is inescapable: what
character is the most simply drawn, androgynous, hairless, scarless,
with a minimum of clothing? To take this query even further, what
character escapes all question of reader's skin color by being an
impossible, Krishna-like blue, the god-like color used in
advertisements demonstrating the absorbency of diapers and
sanitary napkins, a color which implies both science and cleanliness,
as opposed to red or green, both of which signal some connection to
organic life. This conclusion is interesting, particularly when we
realize that Dr. Manhattan is more than hero or superhero -- he is a
superbeing.

Other characters radically misread Dr. Manhattan, treating him
as a high-powered version of themselves, an Uzi instead of a rifle;
but he is, in fact, something altogether different, and the distance
between them as vast as that between a crossbow and an A-bomb.
One hero, Captain Metropolis, attempts to revive the superhero
tradition, forming the Minutemen, but another hero, the Comedian,
demonstrates the absurdity of such an attempt in a nuclear world --
destroying Metropolis's chart of social ills (labeled: anti-war demos,
promiscuity, black unrest, campus subversion, etc.) by setting it
ablaze, declaring; "It doesn't matter squat because inside thirty
years, the nukes are going to be flying like maybugs." (46)

One could argue that Dr. Manhattan symbolizes this nuclear
threat -- that he changes the lives of those around him like an
irresistable force of technology, in the same manner that the
American public's life was changed by the Cold War. Like nuclear
technology, he clearly is seen by the governments within the book as
the deterrant which keeps nuclear war from breaking out. But this is
more than an over-simplification, it is a misreading.

To trace this misreading , let us look at another aspect of
Watchmen's plot. Ozymandias, self-billed as "The Smartest Man on
Earth," intends to end dissension between different countries by
creating an imaginary threat which will unify the earth. He is the
hyperexpression of Horatio Alger principle: instead of a poor boy
who works hard and is given money which makes him rich and
powerful, he is a rich boy who gives all his money away and then
works hard in order to become rich and powerful a second time.
Employing artists, musicians, scientists, and the brain of a dead
psychic, Ozymandias creates a monstrous alien creature which he
teleports to the middle of New York City. The creature dies instantly,
broadcasting mental images of a horrifying, alien world, and killing
most of the population of New York. Convinced that the creature
represents the reality of an outside menace, world leaders unite, and
the threat of war fades. Ozymandias creates, in effect, a false
sublime, a signifier whose signified exists only in the imagination of
those reading that signified, in this case the world leaders.

To accomplish this, Ozymandias must first eliminate the main
impediment to his plans, Dr. Manhattan, who he fears is powerful
enough to stop him. In fact, in trying to rid the world of Dr.
Manhattan, Ozymandias pushes this misreading of "Manhattan =
nuclear threat" on Manhattan -- exposing several characters close to
Manhattan to radiation, or otherwise causing them to develop cancer,
almost as though Manhattan were a Rilkean angel, destroying those
around him with his starkeren Dasein, his stronger existence.
Reading his own existence in this fashion, Dr. Manhattan exiles
himself from Earth.

But Dr. Manhattan represents not missile silos, but the human
spirit in action, just as the other heroes demonstrate alternative
facets of human existence. While the ever-youthful Ozymandias
clearly serves as a walking embodiment of mental power, the other
heroes, their bodies aging, scarred, overweight, represent the body
and its inevitable decay. The three poles form a triangle with
Manhattan at one tip representing spirit, Ozymandias at another
representing mind and the Comedian at the final one, standing in for
the body.

This simple categorization demonstrates how, in the world of
comic books, divisions of black and white are often embodied --
characters split into good and bad halves, a hero's secret identity, in
the shape of their costume, literally comes alive and attacks them,
and the devil appears to bear the soul of a supervillain away, making
some comics resemble nothing so much as medieval morality plays.

Ozymandias is a creature of pure logic, and therefore cannot
achieve the sublime, since that demands the emotions. The figure of
Dr. Manhattan does not represent nuclear weaponry but, rather, our
own feelings about such weaponry, the conglomeration of awe and
fear and pride that surrounds the issue of nuclear armaments. And
it is his struggle, throughout the course of Watchmen, that places our
feelings about such weaponry, our attempts to comprehend its
magnitude, on stage. Let us look next at that struggle.

Initially, Dr. Manhattan is a human being changed by the
experiment which removes his "intrinsic field," a transformation
forced on him by external forces. He exhibits superhuman powers,
manipulating objects outside himself, but at the same time marks
himself as human through sexual encounters with Janey Slater and
Laurie. As the comic progresses, he grows away from that sexuality.
We witness his introduction of multiple selves into the lovemaking,
which might be construed as an act of renewed interest, but it turns
out that at the same time even more selves are working on scientific
experiments in another room, revealing the act for the half-hearted
attempt it is.

It is not until Manhattan exiles himself to Mars that he
contemplates and internalizes the sublime. His exile is vital to this
undertaking. Ferguson observes, " . . . both [Burke and Kant] link . . .
the sublime with individuals isolated either by the simplef act of
their solitude or by a heroic distinction that sets them apart even as
they participate in social enterprises." (3) For Manhattan, the
experiences of external sublimity, the fact that he is sublime in body,
but not in mind, causes him to feel paralyzed, trapped. He muses on
the nature of time. observing that he is a puppet, pre-destined in
everything he does, existing in every moment but at the same time
dissociated or distanced, being the one who watches himself acting,
rather than the actor, sounding much like Wordsworth describing the
sublime moment in poetry.

This moment of Manhattan's "stuckness" is associated with
watches, assemblages of cogs and gears, and it will be concepts
associated with thermodynamics which move him out of this
moment. He is "reborn" through experiencing what is perhaps a
variant of the mathematical, Fibonaccian instead of linear, seeing and
experiencing the random forces which have spiraled together to
create Laurie. He says to her:

. . . in every human coupling, a thousand million sperm
vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless
generations . . . until your mother loves a man she has every
reason to hate, and of that union . . . it was you, only you, that
emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of
improbability, like turning air into gold, that is the crowning
unlikelihood. . . the thermodynamic miracle. (307-309)

We see the sublime moment enacted here -- the exposure to a
sublime force, the resultant paralysis or anxiety, and the movement
beyond that paralysis through an affirmation of human ability to
incorporate, mentally or symbolically, that sublime force, allowing
the individual to experience him/herself as something more than
human, something miraculous. But in the world of the comic book,
such psychological moments cannot be left internal -- they must be
acted out in some manner. And so, Dr. Manhattan returns to earth,
and a confrontation with Ozymandias. Ozymandias destroys him,
forcing Dr. Manhattan to reassemble his atoms, to recreate himself
once again. At the same time, he disassociates himself from the
entity he once was, referring to that past self in the third person,
(399) implying that he is no longer Jon Osterman, but rather a new,
self-created entity, establishing that he has become something more
than Osterman either pre or post nuclear transformation.

It is after this final act of re-creation that Manhattan engages
in several activities which seem to have even more significant than
the other superhuman acts he has performed; Christ-like, he walks
across water, and proceeds up a wall in a moment which recalls
scenes from the old Batman show, where Batman and Robin were
shown painfully progressing up the side of a building, stopping to
chat with celebrity cameos along the way. It is this moment, more
than anything else, that shows he has moved beyond the ordinary
heroic. What the other heroes can do only with the aid of technology,
he accomplishes unencumbered even by clothing.

This outward expression of internal state emphasizes that the
application of literary theory to the comic book form is a valuable
undertaking. McCloud justifies the study of comics by pointing out
that:

Comics is a sight-based medium. Thw whole world of visual
iconography is at the disposal of comic creators, including the
full range of pictorial styles, from realistic representational art
to the simplest cartoons -- to the totally abstract and the
invisible world of symbols and language. (202-203)

While agreeing with McCloud, I would add that the world of the
superhero allows psychoanalytic theories a unique arena: heroes and
villains represent the simplest and most complicated ideas and the
human psyche to be played out in pictorial form. Superheroes have
an established tradition, rules by which their narratives are expected
to operate, allowing the author space to break or cleave to the
reader's expectations. In Watchmen, Moore plays with these
traditions and, in doing so, exposes and underscores the fact that
these heroes are more than individuals -- they are expressions of
human drives and thus, like the heroes that preceeded them,
exemplars of the comic book tradition.

Works Cited:
Benton, Mike. The Comic Book in America: An Illustrated History.
Taylor Publishing Company: Dallas, Texas, 1989.
Ferguson, Frances. Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the
Aesthetics of Individuation. Routledge: New York, 1992.
Hertz, Neil. The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the
Sublime. Columbia University Press: New York, 1985.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. Kitchen Sink Press:
Northampron, Massachusetts, 1993.
Moore, Alan. Watchmen. Warner Books, Inc. : New York, 1987.
Weiskel, Thomas. The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure
and Psychology of Transcendence. Johns Hopkins University Press:
Baltimore, 1986.
Wilson, Rob. American Sublime: The Genealogy of a Poetic Genre.
University of Wisconsin Press: Madison, 1991.

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